1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to a world-wide network, and more particularly to sites of a plurality of Internet World Wide Web (WWW) sites of various owners hosted by a service provider using a group of servers and meeting with agreed-upon service levels.
2. Description of the Related Art
The Internet is the world's largest network, and it has become essential to businesses as well as to consumers. Many businesses have started out-sourcing their e-business and e-commerce Web sites to service providers, instead of operating their Web sites on their own server(s) and managing them by themselves. Such a service provider must install a collection of servers in a farm called a “Web Server Farm (WSF)”, or a “Universal Server Farm (USF)” which can be used by many different businesses to run their e-commerce and e-business applications. These business customers (e.g., the service provider's “customers”) have different “server resource” requirements for their Web sites and applications.
When businesses (hereafter referred to as “customers” or “customers of a server farm”) out-source their e-commerce and/or e-business to a service provider, they must obtain some guarantee on the services they are getting (and will continue to obtain) from the service provider for their sites. Once the service provider has made a commitment to a customer to provide a certain “level” of service (e.g., referred to as a “Service Level Agreement (SLA)”), the provider must guarantee that level of service to that customer.
FIG. 1 illustrates an abstracted view of a conventional server farm. A server farm 103 includes multiple servers which host customer applications, and is connected to Internet 101 via communications link(s) 102. Each customer's server resource requirements changes since the demands to customers' applications change continuously on a dynamic basis during each day of operations.
However, a problem with the conventional system and method used thereby is that, hitherto the present invention, there has been no provision for dynamically equipping the server farm such that server(s) and their resources can be dynamically allocated. Hence, there has been no flexibility in dynamically allocating servers and their resources to customers as the customer's demands change. This results in system-wide inefficiency and general dissatisfaction by the customer.
Another problem with the conventional system is that there are no Service Level Agreements (SLAs) based on dynamic allocation and de-allocation of servers to customer's server clusters.
Yet another problem with the conventional system is that there is no provisioning of SLAs in support of both a guaranteed number of servers and optional additional servers based on the workload changes to customers' applications. Yet another problem with the conventional system is that a “hacker” or “hackers” can generate a large amount of workload to a customer's sites or to the server farm itself to “crash” servers or server farm.